[PHP] Re: Handling XML output in a slim way

[Daniel Schierbeck]

Markus Fischer wrote:
Hi,
up until now, when outputing XML I've been constructing the output as a 
continous string-soup in such ways like

[...]
$xml .= printf('<item name="%s">%s</item>', makeXmlSave($name), 
makexmlSave($contentOfItem));
[...]

makeXmlSave() makes sure that quotes, ampersand, < and > are properly 
escaped with their entity reference. However I was thinking if it wasn't 
possible to e.g. generated a a complete DOM tree first and then just 
having this tree being dumped as XML.

I'm using PHP4 right now.
thanks,
- Markus
In PHP5 the simplexml functions make it very easy to read/edit XML 
documents. For instance

friends.xml:
        <friends>
                <friend>
                        <name>Charlotte</name>
                        <age>21</age>
                </friend>
                <friend>
                        <name>Dan</name>
                        <age>25</age>
                </friend>
                <friend>
                        <name>Jennifer</name>
                        <age>19</age>
                </friend>         
        </friends>
With simplexml you can load that XML document into an object:
        <?php
        $friends = simplexml_load_file('friends.xml');
        foreach ($friends->friend as $friend) {
                echo "Name: {$friend->name}; Age: {$friend->age}\n";
        }
        ?>
Which would output:
        Name: Charlotte; Age: 21
        Name: Dan; Age: 25
        Name: Jennifer; Age: 19
You can also edit the object and save it, either as an XML file or as an 
XML-formatted string. Search for 'simplexml' on php.net to see the full 
documentation.

But it only works in PHP5 ;)
--
Daniel Schierbeck
--
PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php